Revitalizing Criminological Theory:

Towards a new Ultra-Realism

Steve Hall, Simon Winlow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415744362
• eBook ISBN: 9781317800477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a short, comprehensive and accessible introduction to Ultra-Realism: a unique and radical school of criminological thought that has been developed by the authors over a number of years. After first outlining existing schools of thought, their major intellectual flaws and their underlying politics in a condensed guide that will be invaluable to all undergraduate and postgraduate students, Hall and Winlow introduce a number of important new concepts to criminology and suggest a new philosophical foundation, theoretical framework and research programme. These developments will enhance the discipline's ability to explain human motivations, construct insightful representations of reality and answer the fundamental question of why some human beings risk inflicting harm on others to further their own interests or achieve various ends.

Combining new philosophical and psychosocial approaches with a clear understanding of the shape of contemporary global crime, this book presents an intellectual alternative to the currently dominant paradigms of conservatism, neoclassicism and left-liberalism. In using an advanced conception of "harm", Hall and Winlow provide original explanations of criminal motivations and make the first steps towards a paradigm shift that will help criminology to illuminate the reality of our times.

This book is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of criminology, sociology, criminological theory, social theory, the philosophy of social sciences and the history of crime.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315813080-1

This book’s fundamental purpose is very straightforward. The intention is to persuade the reader that Western criminology needs to begin working towards a new theoretical framework which provides an enhanced explanatory capability fit for purpose in today’s rapidly changing world. The era of the alleged ‘international crime decline’ might seem like an inappropriate time to suggest that criminology should revive its investigations of harm and criminal activities with renewed vigour. However, as we shall see in a little more detail later, this ‘crime decline’ is a misleading concept. It applies only to specific regions and nations, and remains trapped in the empirical realm of one-dimensional legally constructed definitions of crime that ignore a huge dark figure of ill-defined, systematically ignored, misperceived, non-criminalized, unreported and unrecorded harms. As the book’s argument unfolds, we will suggest that if contemporary criminology intends to retain some sort of grip on a rapidly changing world, the concept of ‘crime’ is inadequate because in the neoliberal era the general zemiological field of harm is also changing rapidly, and many types of harm are becoming normalized, both in everyday life and the way they are represented by mass media and governments. These harms are opaque to the limited ethical and empirical apparatus that criminology currently uses to define, detect and explain what exists in the world.

The argument we put forward here is not simply the standard assault on the mainstream right-wing or centrist perspectives. What we now call critical criminology’ grew out of a post-war canon of idealist left-liberal criminological theory – sometimes referred to as ‘left idealism’ (Young, 1975). In the 1970s, we will argue, because of over-investment in its sacred domain assumptions, which are rooted in hard-line social constructionism, this paradigm had already reached an intellectual impasse every bit as debilitating as that which ground conservative theory to a halt two decades earlier. We have challenged these assumptions in fine detail elsewhere (see Hall et al., 2008; Hall, 2012a; Winlow and Hall, 2013; Winlow et al., 2015), and interested readers are encouraged to follow up this book with explorations of these more complex works. However, the purpose of this book is to present an accessible stripped-down synopsis of these arguments and the foundations of a new theoretical framework that we have named ultra-realism. This framework can help criminology to produce more penetrative analyses of the world that neoliberalism – relatively unhindered by the least effective left-wing political opposition we have seen for over a century – is currently making for us.

We will not be suggesting that ultra-realism can open up a transparent, all-seeing God’s eye view of the whole world, the totality in which we exist, or, indeed, even the whole world of crime and harm. Because inflicting harm on others is immoral and crime is illegal, and, obviously, being involved in either can provoke some sort of reprisal, perpetrators usually exert huge effort in concealing their actions. Thus the dark figure of unknown events is notoriously large compared to those associated with other major issues researched by social scientists. However, by cutting through the prohibitions placed on research and theorization by criminology’s current dominant and subdominant authorities – i.e. neoclassical realism and left idealism – ultra-realism can open up parallax views, or new perspectives from previously obscured angles that create changes in the observational positions and displacements of the objects in view. Both the powerful and the abject social classes experience important concrete universal truths in their social spaces; truths that have been denied prominent positions in criminology’s research programmes and storehouse of knowledge. It is the task of ultra-realist criminological research and theorization to open up these spaces and throw some light on revealed truths as symptoms of underlying causes and contexts.

In order to present the initial intellectual moves towards the ultra-realist position in a short, yet, we hope, comprehensive, adequately contextualized and accessible work suitable for students and researchers at all levels, we have constructed the chapters as follows. First, Chapter 2 will outline most of the mainstream classical and contemporary theories that can be found in the canon of criminological theory. Attention will be focused on the flaws that afflict these mainstream theories. However, our goal is not simply to dismiss all that has gone before and leave nothing in its place. Rather, it is to re-engage our disciplinary dialectic so that we can develop new ideas better suited to explaining crime and harm in our own unique conjuncture. To do this effectively we must return to informed critique that takes theory building seriously. It is now crucial that criminologists display the courage necessary to commit to informed intellectual positions and defend them honestly in a robust environment of productive critique that is capable of providing the forward motion our discipline so badly needs. We hope that our identification of the flaws of mainstream theories will pose an initial question in the reader’s mind – if these mainstream theories are so flawed, why are many of them still used as frameworks for criminological analyses? This critique of mainstream criminological theories, aimed at their fundamental domain assumptions, should begin to make it clear to the reader why a paradigm shift to ultra-realism is necessary if criminological theory wants to offer more convincing explanations of its objects – crime and harm – and why they appear as they do in today’s world.

Chapter 3 will outline the tradition of critical criminology. We will examine its growth as a broad spectrum of domain assumptions, theoretical approaches and research projects which revolve around the principle of structural imbalances in social power and analyses of the ways in which these imbalances are ideologically constructed in popular culture and the individual’s mind – thus the idealist’ core of the paradigm. The question we will pose here is whether critical criminology’s current theoretical paradigm is up to the task of effectively opposing mainstream criminological theory and advancing the discipline forward. Given what we have said above, there is no prize for guessing that the answer is a qualified ‘no’, but the specific reasons why it can no longer fulfil these tasks must be laid out in basic detail before we can begin to move forward.

Of course this is not the first time that the inadequacies of left-idealist critical criminology have been exposed to critique. From the late 1970s onwards the paradigm of neoclassical realism, or right realism, dominated criminological thought in the so-called ‘real world’ of government, media and popular culture. A major reason for its success is that it received unwavering ideological support from the corporate right-wing press. However, another important reason is that many of critical criminology’s claims, which revolved around the idealist notion that crime was merely a social construct ideologically concocted and hegemonically promoted by the right for its nefarious political purposes, seemed increasingly ludicrous to everyday people who were suffering the worst of the ‘crime explosion’ that occurred in Western nations in the 1980s as they deindustrialized. Chapter 4 will examine the various radical realist responses to left idealist and right realist criminological theories, which, beginning with feminist realism, victimology and left realism, expanded and gained some momentum and credibility in Western governmental circles in the 1980s and 1990s. The radical realist paradigm will be scrutinized in the same way as critical criminology – did it provide an effective political opposition to the right and centrist mainstream, as well as plausible contextualized explanations of contemporary forms of crime and harm?

Chapter 5 will examine the political and philosophical roots of both mainstream and critical paradigms in criminological theory, and how their flaws can be traced back to rigid domain assumptions rooted in traditional philosophical and political positions. Advocates of these positions have tried to impose upon us unshakeable ontological truths about human nature and the social world. Here we will also see how and why these paradigms are protected and reproduced in various institutional settings. This will provide a platform for chapters 6 and 7, which explain the ultra-realist position. By incorporating the new philosophical position of transcendental materialism and the new cultural-historical theory of pseudo-pacification, ultra-realism can advance the alternative paradigm of critical realism, hitherto seriously neglected and under-used in criminological theory, to a position where it can be adopted as a more revealing theoretical framework and research programme.

2 Mainstream Classical and Contemporary Theories

DOI: 10.4324/9781315813080-2

This chapter outlines the development of the main Western schools of criminological theory. The objective is to trawl through and outline their main principles, tensions and, most importantly, flaws in order to explain clearly why a shift through critical realist theory to ultra-realist theory is now essential.

Enlightenment thinking on law and crime was founded in the eighteenth century on the principle that all individuals are born with the God-given gifts of free will, universal reason and a moral sense, and it is each individual’s personal responsibility and duty – expressed in Kant’s (1998) famous deontological notion of the categorical imperative – to apply these gifts and obey a law that has been laid down by others who share them. Transgressors must be punished, in proportion to the seriousness of the crimes they commit, for no other reason than they deserve punishment. This is all very well as a hopeful normative gesture, but it is of little use to criminological theory because it does not answer the fundamental question of why some people do not abide by the categorical imperative and the law. In Hume’s (1967) parlance, the ought overwhelms the is: it tells us ideally what we should do but little about what we actually do in real life and why we do it, or, conversely, why we don’t do it. Therefore from its beginnings Enlightenment criminological thought has been inherently and unshakeably moralistic and idealist.

These modern principles laid the philosophical foundation of the Western criminal justice system in the eighteenth century. However, their principal flaws are well-known (see Bean, 1981). First, certain important aspects of the law can be biased in favour of the powerful social classes, and can act against the relatively powerless, which suggests that the type of ‘reason’ that dominates in any given society is not universal but belongs specifically to the elite. The classical liberal-capitalist system, beholden to the notion of universal reason and individual morality, responsibility and choice as the sole causes of criminal acts, is blind to this social-structural tension. It is a system largely unreceptive to the social, economic and political contexts in which human action takes place. Second, the primacy of reason or conscious understanding in classical thinking either ignores unconscious drives and desires, or at least assumes that human beings are always in control of these powerful forces. The implications of this negligence are enormous – the basic principles and practices that govern the whole individualized, rationalized Western criminal justice system might well be based on faulty one-dimensional conceptions of human nature and the social structure (see Hall, 2012a). Basically, it is an avowedly idealist position with only a passing interest in contextual reality.

The philosophy of utilitarianism added a naturalized ontological, rationalist and consequentialist layer underneath classical liberal thinking, which in its Kantian variant was still governed by metaphysics, deontology and intrinsicalist morality – what this means in simple terms is that all individuals have a duty to conform to the law because it is the product of universal morality and reason and therefore an end in itself. Utilitarians were considerably less metaphysical, deontological and intrinsicalist. They were naturalistic, claiming that the human being is driven by natural instincts to avoid pain and seek pleasure. However, they also thought that human beings have the natural ability to rationalize and calculate the consequences of their actions, and the sensibilities required to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy forms of pleasure. The law must make sure that the costs of committing crime outweigh the benefits, which should deter the majority of individuals from committing crime and threatening the rights and property of others. This position is consequentialist because it moves beyond intrinsicalism to claim that both potential perpetrators and the onlookers of visible punishments base their actions on their predicted consequences. Therefore, on a broader social scale, the deterrent effect of the law can have consequences for individuals and their social lives. The law and its delivery of justice is not just an end in itself but can become a means to broader social – and, by extension, political – ends.

Utilitarianism, however, is contradictory at its ontological root. The claim that human beings are free-willed contradicts the basic premise that we are driven primarily by natural pleasure/pain instincts. In other words, we have choices but when we get down to the very fundamental choice over whether to put our own hedonistic interests first we do not. As we shall see later, this is an obsolete eighteenth century position that fails to understand how twentieth century consumer culture has manipulated and stimulated individuals’ instinct for pleasure to the extent that it exerts pressure on the psyche, which shapes and intensifies desire and orientates it to external consumer objects. This inclines the individual to occasionally bypass the rational calculation of consequences and risk the high costs associated with illegal expressive and acquisitive activities (Hallsworth, 2006; Hall et al., 2008). In a nutshell, utilitarianism was an early form of naturalistic realism that tried to dig under metaphysical idealism to posit a real, natural basis for human nature but grossly over-simplified it and got it largely wrong. Therefore, as we shall see later, we need a far more sophisticated and realistic conception of human nature.

Classical liberalism did contain its own oppositional stance, founded on John Locke’s notion of the individual as tabula rasa, a blank slate on which culture writes its scripts, which influenced the radical liberal position that we will encounter later. However, the first paradigm to develop in late nineteenth century Europe as a serious institutional challenge to the orthodox classical liberal notion of free will was positivism (Melossi, 2008). There were two main schools – bio-psychological and sociological positivism.

The field of bio-psychological positivism, developing from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, is a set of theories based on the principle that inherited predispositions to aggressive, impulsive and anti-social behaviour vary in intensity in different ‘personality types’ amongst individuals. These traits, which Lombroso (1876) argued are identifiable by outward physical manifestations or stigmata’, are transmitted across the generations by genes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, extreme right-wing and nationalistic political groups believed that these traits are identifiable in specific inferior cultural and social groups, which means that crime can be reduced only by eliminating these groups. Horrific political movements such as Nazism adopted this principle to gain pseudo-scientific credibility amongst their populations (see Rafter, 2009). This position ignores the plasticity and adaptability of the human neurological system, which, if true, demolishes biologism’s foundational principle of heritable characteristics. We will investigate this in further detail later when we discuss transcendental materialism.

However, more enlightened biological theorists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Enrico Ferri (1898), who was a left-wing socialist – and not, as Rafter (2009) claims, an unreconstructed follower of the biological determinist Lombroso – argued that the biologically innate impulses that lead to aggression and selfishness are latent aspects of everyone’s basic constitution and can be triggered by specific environmental factors (see also Owen, 2012). Therefore Ferri argued that the causes of criminality can be found in the conditions in which some people live, not in unique inherited characteristics, and these conditions are the products of an unequal capitalist socioeconomic system. Of course, this cannot explain criminality amongst the powerful and well-to-do elite members of society, or different individual tendencies in the same conditions. Although contemporary forms of bio-psychological theorizing are more enlightened and less rigid (Meloni, 2014), in its traditional form it is one-dimensional and reductive, based on the sort of obsolete ontological conceptualizations of human nature from which new realist criminology must try to escape.

Sociological positivism is an early social scientific position that claims to be able to use scientific methods of observation, data production and data analysis to identify real causes and effects in the social world. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards it mounted one of the most serious challenges to classicism. Hard positivism claimed to identify direct causes for phenomenologically registered events. Soft positivism, a less deterministic doctrine, provided early social scientists with a set of probabilistic hypotheses and theories that identify less definite and less predictable but still ana...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Epigraph
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Mainstream Classical and Contemporary Theories
• 3 The Radical Realist Response
• 4 The Radical Realist Response
• 5 Untangling the Politics of Criminological Theory
• 6 Ultra-Realist Criminological Theory
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index